Guilty subjects

Abstract

This chapter explores how guilt and innocence are being re-territorialized across the United States metropolitan landscape. I plot the moral and geographical coordinates through which longstanding blame ideologies that once freighted blackness, dependency, and depravity with the city on the one hand, and self-sufficiency, whiteness and virtue with the suburbs on the other have been reworked. After providing a brief overview of recent scholarship on financialization and cities, I explore the politics of home ownership in the United States from the immediate post-war period to the present, emphasizing how, over time, the notion of home became disarticulated from the ideas of prosperity, upward mobility, and civic engagement, and how the form of homeownership backed by the 30-year mortgage became less inevitable and, from a variety of political perspectives, less desirable. I then discuss the politics of virtue and blame as they have played out in conjunction with these changes, emphasizing the representation of strategic defaulters and financially distressed defaulters, post-crisis financial subjects whose guilt or innocence helps to suture together the post-crisis political geography. The final part of the paper highlighting the role of finance and real estate in exacerbating divisions in the US classand race-stratified body politic and points to signs of new political possibilities on the horizon that use different temporal and political schemes to reapportion blame and responsibility for housing precarity and financial risk-taking.